NAME

       sensors-detect - detect hardware monitoring chips

SYNOPSIS

       sensors-detect [ --auto ]

DESCRIPTION

       sensors-detect  is  an interactive program that will walk you through the process of scanning your system
       for various hardware monitoring chips, or sensors, supported by libsensors(3), or more generally  by  the
       lm_sensors tool suite.

       sensors-detect will look for the following devices, in order:

       •      Sensors embedded in CPUs, south bridges and memory controllers.

       •      Sensors embedded in Super I/O chips.

       •      Hardware monitoring chips accessed through ISA I/O ports.

       •      Hardware monitoring chips reachable over the SMBus or more generally any I2C bus on your system.

       As the last two detection steps can cause trouble on some systems, they are normally not attempted if the
       second  detection  step  led  to  the  discovery  of  a  Super I/O chip with complete hardware monitoring
       features.  However, the user is always free to ask for all detection steps if so is  his/her  wish.  This
       can  be useful if a given system has more than one hardware monitoring chip. Some vendors are known to do
       this, most notably Asus and Tyan.

OPTIONS

       --auto Run in automatic, non-interactive mode. Assume default answers to all questions.  Note  that  this
              isn't  necessarily  safe  as  the  internal  logic  may lead to potentially dangerous probes being
              attempted. See the WARNING section below.

WARNING

       sensors-detect needs to access the hardware for most of the chip detections.  By definition,  it  doesn't
       know  which  chips are there before it manages to identify them. This means that it can access chips in a
       way these chips do not like, causing problems ranging from SMBus lockup to permanent hardware  damage  (a
       rare case, thankfully.)

       The authors made their best to make the detection as safe as possible, and it turns out to work just fine
       in most cases, however it is impossible to guarantee that sensors-detect will not lock or kill a specific
       system.  So,  as a rule of thumb, you should not run sensors-detect on production servers, and you should
       not run sensors-detect if can't afford replacing a random part of your system. Also, it is recommended to
       not force a detection step which would have been skipped by default, unless you know what you are doing.

SEE ALSO

       sensors(1), libsensors(3)

AUTHOR

       Frodo Looijaard and Jean Delvare

lm-sensors 3                                     September 2013                                SENSORS-DETECT(8)